Tru2way plug-and-play digital cable support still AWOL

Tru2way support was supposed to bring plug-and-play two-way support to digital …

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2008, Comcast and Panasonic showed off a pair of "tru2way" devices that were harbingers of a brave new world, one in which two-way services over digital cable would be plug-and play. TVs and DVRs would soon get Java-based middleware that could download and execute cable apps, including program guides, video-on-demand, caller ID, even e-mail. In May 2008, six other major cable companies signed on, as did Sony. The CableLabs research consortium estimated that 90 million US homes would have access to tru2way by the end of 2008.

But in late 2009, tru2way remains a niche product.

Upgrading CableCARD

Every few months, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) compiles CableCARD data for the FCC from the largest cable operators in the US (Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner Cable). This brief report is typically used to take a dig at the FCC-mandated CableCARD system, and the newest report is no exception.

The top 10 cable companies have deployed a mere 412,000 CableCARDs for use in things like TVs and TiVos. But when the FCC decided that cable company set-top boxes also had to use CableCARDs for their decryption hardware (to level the playing field), those top 10 companies rolled out "more than 16,710,000 operator-supplied set-top boxes with CableCARDs. Therefore, in just over 24 months, cable operators have deployed almost 38 times as many CableCARD-enabled devices than the total number of CableCARDs requested by customers for use in retail devices in over the last five years."

This is a not-especially-subtle way of rubbing the agency's nose in the fact that consumers don't want or use CableCARD devices of their own accord, and in fact are far more happy just renting a box from the cable company. (It didn't help that consumer electronics devices with CableCARDs could only handle one-way data transmission and therefore could not access many cable services.)

What intrigued us about the report was this brief note: "As of August 31, 2009, 29 consumer electronics manufacturers have had 605 Unidirectional Digital Cable Ready Product models (such as Digital Cable Ready DTV sets) certified, verified, or self-verified for use with CableCARDs as well as eight (8) tru2way devices certified for such use."

Tru2way, the system that was to fix all the weaknesses of the original CableCARD scheme, only had eight certified devices two years after the CES event? (Note that tru2way still requires a CableCARD for decryption, but the host devices run an OCAP middleware stack and can handle two-way communication.)

Status report, Mr. Spock!

In our quest to find out where tru2way was at, we checked in with NCTA, the cable industry trade group. They told us that there was still no national rollout date for tru2way support and that each cable operator would have to answer for its own plans. They did note that 2.5 million set-top boxes with tru2way support have already been rolled out "in several markets nationwide" so that TV watchers can get tru2way features without buying a new television.

But where would tru2way devices actually do something? (They require headend upgrades from the cable company.) We contacted Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Cablevision, and Charter to find out; no one offered answers except Comcast, where Jenni Moyer told us that Comcast was still supporting tru2way only in Chicago, Denver, and Atlanta. The deployment will continue through the end of the year and into next before eventually covering Comcast's entire service area.

Delays in the deployment of new technology are common and probably not a big deal, though in this case the cable industry has to contend with more than the usual competitors. Consumer electronics makers aren't deploying tru2way quickly, but they are rapidly adding interactive features like Netflix streaming; get 50 million Netflix-capable TVs, DVD players, and setup boxes like Roku into the hands of the public, and some fraction of that public will start deciding that streamed video ($9/month) and over-the-air TV (free) are better than $50+ month cable bills.

Tru2way's backers had intended to move quickly on deploying the technology. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) they all signed back in May 2008 said that all cable headends would support tru2way by July 2009. That isn't even close to happening, so far as we can tell, though the device makers have grudgingly accepted the delays.

"I can't say I'm happy about the results—we would have liked for things to happen more quickly—but we have to be realistic about the complexity of this project," said Jeff Cove, Panasonic's vice president of strategic alliances, to Multichannel News in late June. "My sense is the cable companies are trying to meet the deadlines."

Still, there is progress. Tru2way products continue to be designed and tested, and CableLabs says that its industry interop events are going well. In May, one such event attracted 20 suppliers "for a week of laboratory sessions where numerous tru2way and Enhanced TV Binary Interchange Format (EBIF) applications ran across multiple headends, user agents and set-top boxes."

NCTA told the FCC late this summer that "cooperation and open communication between cable and CE has never been better—cable and CE are holding regular tru2way 'summits' to brief each other on the progress of deployments, stay abreast of new developments and coordinate solutions to bugs that develop in the implementation process. CableLabs processes have also been improved."

Be that as it may, here's where we are now: a few certified tru2way devices, Comcast headend deployments in three markets, and 2.5 million tru2way set-top boxes in the wild (Time Warner alone has rolled out 1.7 million of these).

For those curious about the certified devices, CableLabs maintains a complete list (PDF). Those with "Host 2.0" next to them are tru2way devices, though note that model numbers sometimes appear more than once. Here are the devices (we were only able to find seven unique models, not eight).